A friend of mine is struggling with this, as the university is getting rid of the 35mm projector he's taught his intro to film class with for the past 15 years. He is having a terrible time finding films for the spring semester, since they're doing this mid-school year. Ugh.

Darth_Lukecash:This isn't the first time a change has destroyed cinema history.

From silent to sound, from black and white to color...

Apparently we've lost 90% of cinema history already. Only a fraction of the silent films still exist.

this isnt the first time that change has destroyed history.Funnier still, how much knowledge is no longer being stored on data?At what point in the future does our society "disappear" from an archaeological point of view?

/there have been some interesting articles and stories about leaving messages to be read in the distant future.

namatad:At what point in the future does our society "disappear" from an archaeological point of view?

The Flintstones age actually came after the Jetson's.

They were a "modern" stone age family.

After the sprocket/cog corporate wars. The earth was left in ruins. No more flying cars, no more high rise apartments.

All Digital Media was lost..music, books, education texts. What remained was hard copy print films, books and LPs. Forgotten in the vaults of ground based libraries.

Using that media which did not require specialized players the ground dwellers rebuilt a society based on the 50's and 60's decades of America. LP/Film Movies/and hard copy books were the template to imitate cultures and styles.

As someone who couldn't see Lincoln today because the compu-perjecter-thingy wanted to show Red Dawn instead and the employees couldn't figure out how to re-jigger the movietronic gizmo, I'm getting a kick out of these replies.

peterthx:2001 wasn't made in Cinerama, but was a 65MM conversion anyway.

There was "Three strip" cinerama...and only a handful of movies where made with that....it required three projectors. (and frankly looked like crap..because of the blurr lines between the projectors).The single projector conversion process allowed 70MM movies (no matter how they got to 70MM)...to be shown in the curved cinerama screen. Yes, they're a lot of formats.

optikeye:peterthx: 2001 wasn't made in Cinerama, but was a 65MM conversion anyway.

There was "Three strip" cinerama...and only a handful of movies where made with that....it required three projectors. (and frankly looked like crap..because of the blurr lines between the projectors).The single projector conversion process allowed 70MM movies (no matter how they got to 70MM)...to be shown in the curved cinerama screen. Yes, they're a lot of formats.

Yes, there were also 65MM Ultra Panavision (anamorphic, like It's A Mad Mad Mad World) and regular "flat" which 2001 was.

It still was a cheat...like most "IMAX" showings of films today, or 70MM prints of 35MM features in the 70s and 80s.

It didn't keep well at room temp...salt mines are where the some are stored now.

Eastman Kodak had a stock that was used in lots of color films from the 60's...which has color shifted to red. But those are being restored (only the big ones---Fahrenheit 451 was shot on that--and until recently--if you saw that movie on TV..it was 'redshifted' before they restored it).The Technicolor process still looks wonderful after decades of storage.

peterthx:Yes, there were also 65MM Ultra Panavision (anamorphic, like It's A Mad Mad Mad World) and regular "flat" which 2001 was.

One of the more interesting, okay kinda bizarre...takes on 2001. Was that Kubrick wanted the ratio of the film itself to be the 'monolith'. Shooting information to your eyes. The screen itself is the monolith.

Interesting take on the film...but WTF? Not sure if that's the right link tho...TL/DR.

But, my personal Kudos goes to the actor (or director) the one that takes pictures on moonbase that's walking around the confrence room..and goes to the elevator.....he walks fast, to the elevator and leans in, then rebounds his momentum as you would in low gravity. Bending into the motion and rebounding to stop motion.

that too, though also in the earlier days no one really worried about durable film stock. It's like early TV, a lot of stuff is gone because no one thought there was any reason to keep it.

Oh, yeah. Live TV? Never recorded and it's gone except for a handful of rare recordings. Early videotape was hard to edit and dub, so there are no extra copies, and the stuff degraded and denatured like early film stock.

Anything that was saved on 5.25 floppy disk and was never converted is now gone, of course, as is anything you put on 3.5 floppy disk, just in case you were wondering...I wonder how many people saved things on old disks or hard drives "for their grandkids" and is now sitting in safety deposit boxes somewhere in a now-unreadable medium. At least with old film stock it can be retrieved with a light bulb and a lot of patience. But if you saved something even in an old Word format, you might never be able to recover it.

doglover:vygramul: Hey - kids graduating college in May were born after it was made. That's antiquated by their standards.

Antique is 25+ years.

25+

3 years short, buddy. Go pound sand.

Subby was using antiquated sarcastically. I know it's hard to tell without quotation marks. But, it's a type of wordplay that requires you to think for a moment longer than it takes to be one of the first four commenters.

bob_ross:I had the most insanely smoking ex-model, super tall, hot, thin, huge rack, seemingly intelligent ex-roommate who didn't watch movies "Before the 90's" because she thought they were "old and stupid".

/forced her to watch Star Wars, Empire and Jedi//Didn't understand what was the "big deal"

Only a fraction of repertory titles have been transferred to Digital Cinema Packages (essentially hard drives with files of movies). Warhorses like Singin' in the Rain and Lawrence of Arabia will always be upgraded to the latest digital format, of course. But how about a B-thriller by Anthony Mann? Or a Western by Budd Boetticher?

Isn't there a simple way of digitising them? I'm not talking about a restoration but just taking a print, running it through a machine and getting a digital file out of it?

This sort of thing sounds like a job for Kickstarter. You want to see a restored version of The Age of Innocence, put your hand in your pocket and pay for it, because honestly, the tiny audience that will pay to see that at the cinema won't pay for it (but it is a great film on the big screen because it looks so gorgeous).

The one thing that has long bothered me about Fark is how easily sarcasm or satire is missed by so many people, despite it being a website dependent on those features. For example: taking a headline at face value.

"The UCLA Film & Television Archive has made a public appeal for money to preserve films starring Laurel and Hardy, one of cinema's most famous comedy teams. RHI, which currently owns the rights to the films, reportedly refuses to fund their preservation."

Solution: Don't sell the rights to your films to any swinging dick who has enough money to fund your coke habit for two weeks.

If all these dipshiats who drone on and on about media being "property" actually treated their media as property when it came to anything but extorting money from people, they'd get a lot more sympathy from me.

Ice Pirate:doglover: vygramul: Hey - kids graduating college in May were born after it was made. That's antiquated by their standards.

Antique is 25+ years.

25+

3 years short, buddy. Go pound sand.

Subby was using antiquated sarcastically. I know it's hard to tell without quotation marks. But, it's a type of wordplay that requires you to think for a moment longer than it takes to be one of the first four commenters.

Not only that, but antique is defined by Smoot-Hawley as 100 years, so our friend here doesn't even know the definition himself, or he might have understood the exaggeration.

Gyrfalcon:Anything that was saved on 5.25 floppy disk and was never converted is now gone, of course, as is anything you put on 3.5 floppy disk, just in case you were wondering...

All of my 5.25" disks still work fine, though I don't have anything important on them of course. I still have a 3.5" floppy drive in my newest PC and USB floppy drives are easy to get. Now if you have something stored on 8" floppy disks or something more obscure like Floptical that might be a problem.

I have a problem and maybe one of you knowledgeable FARKers can help me. I have an audio tape recording that my father sent from Viet Nam to my mother on the occasion of the birth of my little sister in 1965. He passed away in 1972. It was recorded on a tape recorder similar to this:

but this is not the exact make, model, or even for all I know, manufacturer. I took the tape to a guy in Minneapolis who thought he could recover something, but he didn't have the right format. Any and all suggestions would be appreciated. I'd love to hear my father's voice again.

Babwa Wawa:Solution: Don't sell the rights to your films to any swinging dick who has enough money to fund your coke habit for two weeks.

If all these dipshiats who drone on and on about media being "property" actually treated their media as property when it came to anything but extorting money from people, they'd get a lot more sympathy from me.

The worst part isn't that they don't want to make money - it's that they own sole rights to exploit it. If they're incompetent at doing it, or decide that it's not in their corporate or personal interest (e.g. Song of the South, Clockwork Orange), that's it.

I'll gladly pay whoever owns Mr Do for a version for PC, but they won't farking release it. So, I play it through MAME instead.

The main problem is the term of copyright. It should be 25-30 years. I doubt any movie investment is calculated over a longer period, so it won't affect creation, but we get more into our culture earlier.

UNAUTHORIZED FINGER:I have a problem and maybe one of you knowledgeable FARKers can help me. I have an audio tape recording that my father sent from Viet Nam to my mother on the occasion of the birth of my little sister in 1965. He passed away in 1972. It was recorded on a tape recorder similar to this:

[www.tompolk.com image 522x388]

but this is not the exact make, model, or even for all I know, manufacturer. I took the tape to a guy in Minneapolis who thought he could recover something, but he didn't have the right format. Any and all suggestions would be appreciated. I'd love to hear my father's voice again.

There are places like this that can do that for you, or you might watch ebay and find a player for it. I would be a little hesitant about mailing it off someplace though, being the only copy in existence that would be a bit risky. Maybe check some audiophile forums and post pictures of the tapes, someone will probably be able to identify them and tell you what you need to play them.

UNAUTHORIZED FINGER:. I took the tape to a guy in Minneapolis who thought he could recover something, but he didn't have the right format. Any and all suggestions would be appreciated. I'd love to hear my father's voice again.

blimey. heartbreaking story on Fark. Wish I could help more, but probably two options:-

1. Find an old player that works (like eBay)2. Keep looking around for conversion services or try various vintage audio forums.

Gyrfalcon:Oh, yeah. Live TV? Never recorded and it's gone except for a handful of rare recordings. Early videotape was hard to edit and dub, so there are no extra copies, and the stuff degraded and denatured like early film stock.

About 20 years ago, I worked in a college media library - lots of older films and such. They had several stacks of big plastic containers holding two inch videotapes. The recordings had been made at the local PBS station, and were mostly of live performances.

They were recorded with a very rare video recording machine - a quad-scan helical recorder (yes, for you video nuts, there was such a thing, and it wasn't made by Ampex) that wasn't made like the other, more popular machines of the day. There were only four ever made, and three of them were already gone. Only one even existed at that point, and it didn't work - it had been cannibalized for one of the ones that were later scrapped. The guy who owned it needed new record heads and transport parts to make the thing work - it was going to cost over $50,000 just to machine the new drum for the heads. Due to the age of the tapes, any attempt to play them back was going to be a "read once" affair, since the heads were probably going to strip the iron oxide off of the tape due to the age of the stock.

In other words? Those hundred or so recordings (including things like the Alvin Ailey dance troupe from the early 1960s and a bunch of jazz artists playing live sessions) are never going to be played back. As far as I know, they're still sitting in the film storage room.

I don't think we will be able to get the full resolution of the old Super Panavision projections until we get up to at lest an 8K image. Classics like Lawrence or 2001 had such a great image you needed to turn your head to take in all the action and it was tack sharp all the way to the frame corners. I have yet to see this replicated digitally. The experience was as far from today's tunnel vision cinemaplexes as you could get. I am also waiting to see the Hobbit in 48fps. I'm not sure if this is an improvement.

I was discussing this with my sons at the dinner table. One of the most awesome movie experiences I ever had was a 70mm Cinerama print of "Patton". I would gladly pay 3D price to see a fully updated print with enhanced sound.